Agreed that ASICs suck. They centralize and suck value from coins. I don't believe in equality (regarding income inequality debates) but believe in equal opportunity and not everyone has access to ASICs. (To be overly frank, if you're not sucking Chinese dick you're not getting a good deal on an ASIC in the current market.)
ASICs don't centralize or suck value... the people who use them do that. And frankly, when a new coin comes on the market... what do all those GPU miners do? They centralize in pools and mine quickly... then sell off their earnings. None of those actions can be seen as altruistic on the part of GPU miners.
The reason I say ASICs suck value from coins is because ASIC manufacturers put up large capital in order to develop and manufacture them and pass the cost onto the buyers.
Ok... they invest money into R&D. They deserve to be paid for their efforts. They are a business, not a charity, right?
This becomes increasingly so as the node size shrinks. A buyer might pay $10,000 for a money printing machine that has no other purpose so they are likely to immediately dump coins in order to recoup their investment. I'm mainly looking at Bitmain, all those billions in revenue were siphoned off of coins.
Yes, they are a business, so they will dump the coins in order to pay their employees, continue research and development... and you know stay in business.
This movement was originally piggybacked on the existing CPU & GPU distribution channels (as fair a distribution as we can hope for PoW hardware in this world).
GPUs weren't in the picture in the original days of bitcoin POW. The fact that GPUs were already multi-purpose ASICs seem to be forgotten. Just because they were already on the market... and marketed for a completely different purpose doesn't take away the fact that GPUs quickly displaced CPUs. Now, specialized ASICs are pushing out the multi-purpose ASICs (GPUs), and we are shocked by this? Honestly?
GPUs can be used for other applications and so retain value outside of mining, this results in less pressure to immediately dump coins to recoup investment. At the very least I'd say that ASIC sell pressure is heavier. My biggest concern though is that not everyone has access to ASICs and it is a much larger barrier to entry. The pool centralization issue is shared by ASICs and GPUs so I'll punt on that for now.
Don't punt that one... that's the heart of the matter when it comes to the "centralized vs. decentralized" argument that everyone likes to skirt around.
Some ASIC manufacturers do some shady things.
That's probably true. Many people want it to be true. It gives them a boogey-man to hate when their GPU revenues are down.
Another consideration is that GPU miners are becoming increasingly aware that they can subsidize their home heating costs and allows them to keep hardware online during unprofitable times which is good for network security. ASICs are loud and impractical for this.
The ASIC manufacturers are getting better at this. The Z9 mini isn't too loud, nor is that watercooled Zeno beast.
In addition to ZEN the same crisis is being faced by Ethereum and Decred who have recently succumb to ASICs, pushing out GPU miners. I think a solid argument can be made that individuals being able to participate in mining adds value to projects from levels ranging from a gamer mining with a single GPU to larger home miners with 250+ GPUs.
So what's the difference between a hobby miner with one ASIC and a "pro" with 250+ ASICs... and your one GPU gamer and "large" home miner with 250+ GPUs?
I think there is a contradiction between your stance that ASICs "centralize" coins when you accept that 250+ GPU "home miners" are ok. That many GPUs is a business, not a hobby.
I don't see 250+ GPU home miners as a threat to centralization. They are spread throughout regions, on different power grids, on different internet backbones, and most importantly they are controlled by us free thinking individuals. Many of us privacy advocates cannot be bought out or coerced to behave maliciously and attack the network. An entity like Bitmain with massive warehouses that stretch farther than the eye can see are centralized, influenced politically, and corruptible.
What about the large farms that have 1000's of GPUs all in central locations?
I'd like to invite everyone to perform a thought experiment and ask themselves if Bitcoin (the coin with the first mover advantage) would be any different had they chosen to fork off ASICs. The answer to what the ZEN team should do probably lies at the end of this discussion.
In what way did ASICs coming to bitcoin hurt the value or usability of the coin?
My point here is that I think Bitcoin would be at least as successful as it is today if not more so had they forked off ASICs due to even better network effects. Back in 2009 Satoshi didn't have more promising ASIC resistant algorithms like Ethash, ProgPOW, or memory bandwidth constrained algos. There was also no precedent for how things would play out. Bitcoin has a dysfunctional governance that innovates too slow but that is why we're here in the altcoin section looking to ZEN to carry the torch!
Fair point.
I think the whole Sia coin saga brings home the point of ASIC vs non-ASIC arguments. The coin creators were just fine with having ASICs available to secure their network... as long as it was *their* ASIC you were buying. When they got beat to the punch by a competitor, their first knee-jerk reaction was to see if they should ban the competitor. How would that have helped the coin succeed?
